Tuesday, 31 January 2017

Triptych story
of a young black homosexual – from childhood to adulthood – as he struggles to
find his place in the world while growing up in a rough neighborhood of Miami.

Beautiful,
gripping, penetrating drama with an almost electric delicacy. It presents such a
wide viewpoint of empathy that is rarely seen on screen, despite its affected
air of broken-hearted yearning. The performances are uniformly remarkable.

Three girls are
kidnapped by a man with a diagnosed 23 distinct personalities, and must try and
escape before the apparent emergence of a frightful new 24th.

With all the
technique that Shyamalan is capable of with his camera, it remains nevertheless
consistently mystifying why his scripts do nothing but insult his audience’s
intelligence at every instant. This might be his most obnoxious film yet, using
very serious concerns like abduction and mental illness in order to give an
ersatz gravitas to an infantile horror piece. Much of it seems suspiciously
cavalier, until a final twist ending which, from a cineaste’s perspective, is
both utterly infuriating and pathetic.